If the value of man's life on earth is to be measured in
dollars and miles and horse-power, ancient Greece must count as a
poverty-stricken and a minute territory; its engines and implements were nearer
to the spear and bow of the savage than to our own telegraph and aeroplane.
Even if we neglect merely material things and take as our standard the actual
achievements of the race in conduct and in knowledge, the average clerk who
goes to town daily, idly glancing at his morning newspaper, is probably a better
behaved and infinitely better informed person than the average Athenian who sat
spellbound at the tragedies of Aeschylus. It is only by the standard of the
spirit, to which the thing achieved is little and the quality of mind that
achieved it much, which cares less for the sum of knowledge attained than for
the love of knowledge, less for much good policing than for one free act of
heroism, that the great age of Greece can be judged as something extraordinary
and unique in value.

By this standard, if it is a legitimate and reasonable one
to apply, we shall be able to understand why classical Greek literature was the
basis of education throughout all later antiquity; why its re-discovery,
however fragmentary and however imperfectly understood, was able to intoxicate
the keenest minds of Europe and constitute a kind of spiritual 'Re-birth', and
how its further and further exploration may be still a task worth men's
spending their lives upon and capable of giving mankind guidance as well as
inspiration.

But is such a standard legitimate and reasonable? We shall
gain nothing by unanalysed phrases. But I think surely it is merely the natural
standard of any philosophical historian. Suppose it is argued that an average
optician at the present day knows more optics than Roger Bacon, the inventor of
spectacles; suppose it is argued that therefore he is, as far as optics go, a
greater man, and that Roger Bacon has nothing to teach us; what is the answer?
It is, I suppose, that Roger Bacon, receiving a certain amount of knowledge
from his teachers, had that in him which turned it to unsuspected directions
and made it immensely greater and more fruitful. The average optician has
probably added a little to what he was taught, but not much, and has doubtless
forgotten or confused a good deal. So that, if by studying Roger Bacon's life
or his books we could get into touch with his mind and acquire some of that
special moving and inspiring quality of his, it would help us far more than
would the mere knowledge of the optician.